The Tragedy of Arthur
A Novel
Arthur Phillips
Random House: 368 pp., $26
First, the MacGuffin: Arthur Phillips' fifth novel, "The Tragedy of Arthur," is built around a full-length, five-act Shakespeare play, "The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie...

Hans Keilson was a newly minted physician in the mid-1930s when the persecution began. As a Jew in Hitler's Germany, he was stripped of the right to practice medicine. A writer, he soon lost that identity too: His autobiographical first novel was pulped...

A boy moves away from his small-town central Illinois home after his father murders a tenant farmer. Years later, an occasional childhood playmate ignores the boy in a high school corridor. Out of that awkward, wordless moment emerged "So Long, See You...

The genesis of "... i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces," a new book of vintage photographs with musical accompaniment, came simply, during one of artist Steve Roden's regular visits to the flea market.
"This is how it always happens —...

In my family, we've never recognized a distinction between happiness and the handling of books.
Books in libraries, books in shops. Books that take you places, and books you can steal from — like Norman Maclean's memoir, "A River Runs Through It," whose opening sentence (about religion and fly-fishing) has been ransacked for the benefit of that first paragraph.
My father, a journalist and professor, haunted bookstores, collected first editions and briefly ran his own tiny bookshop. For his 80th...

You bookworms out there might want to stock up on reads for the three-day weekend. Our three Costa Mesa libraries will be closed on Monday for the Labor Day holiday.
The Mesa Verde Library, 2969 Mesa Verde Drive East, will offer these child-centered activities during the next two weeks: "READ OC" Family Reading Time at 6:30 p.m. Thursday; and "Lego Wednesday" from 2 to 3 p.m. Sept. 14.
Call (714) 546-5274 for more information.
The Costa Mesa Donald Dungan Library, 1855 Park Ave., will hold a Family...

Each novelist requires circumstance — a situation to describe, from which a conflict arises — and the ivy-covered college hall or dormitory room provides such context readily. It would take research and, thereafter, expertise to write about a Fortune 500 company or those who built the Cabot Trail; why not invoke old campus adventures instead? That hoary advice to the young author "write about what you know" results in volume after volume about school: All writers have been students, and...

Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov who helped protect and translate his father's work while pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver, has died. He was 77.
The younger Nabokov died Wednesday at a hospital in Vevey, Switzerland, after a long illness, said literary agent Andrew Wylie.
Dmitri spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father, considered one of the premier writers of the 20th century for such books as "Lolita"...

I was going to say Big Brother, that nonexistent, but tyrannically perpetuated abstraction. As for a real character, how about Madame Defarge from "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens. She the vengeful, bloodthirsty embodiment of a revolution gone mad. Created out of the injustice meted out by aristocrats, she uses the same tactics to oppress others.
— Adam Music, Lakemoor
While reading "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," I became so angry with Dolores Umbridge and the horrible...